In this historical thriller set in 1862, delicious gay romance counterpoints maritime adventure. Real locations and events form the background to a very human drama which touched tens of thousands of lives.
Mel Keegan is back at sea in the days of tall ships and high adventure ...
It is an age when sail and steam are technologies in collision, and the thousand-year tradition of the tall ships is coming to an end. Men like Bill Ryan and Jim Hale are caught in the jaws of change, in a world where survival depends on raw courage, strength and a willingness to take terrible risks
1862, on the east coast of England: the railway is the death knell of the coastal shipping trade, and many small lines like Eastcoast Packet won’t survive. Jim Hale is about to inherit Eastcoast and the schooner Spindrift ... if he and Captain Bill Ryan can first survive the explosive violence of the North Sea storms, and the vicious schemes of the shipwrecker, Nathan Kerr. Always a dangerous man, Kerr has a score to settle with Jim – and with Ryan, who has allied himself to Eastcoast. For men who have the courage to be lovers in this time, and this place, the struggle is dire, the rewards astonishing.
Excerpt
Chapter Two
Wreckers’ weather.
The gale was a northeaster, typical around the equinoxes and in winter, and before the assault of the wind and pounding waves a ship on these shores had no safe anchorage save Harwich, and even that had become a deathtrap since the growth of Landguard Point, thirty years before.
Scenes of shipwreck were too commonplace to merit even a men-tion in a regional newspaper. For a century and more, salvage crews had grown rich on the spoils of ‘mercy dashes,’ as they raced one an- other to take passengers and crew off stricken vessels. But when the caprices of wind and weather were not enough, who had not heard the whispered prayer, ‘Please God, send a ship ashore before morning.’
Like a dragon in the sky, the northeasterly gale howled over the cliffs of Scarborough, rattled the window panes, tested the roofing and shouted in the chimneys. Jim Hale threw down his pen and knuckled his eyes, which had grown tired after hours of book work. Manifests, charts and logs had never been his interest.
He would have preferred to be out and doing, up and moving, but since the little Scotch smack, Eliza, had foundered off Blackhall Rocks where she had stood at anchor, waiting to load a cargo from the col- liery, Eastcoast Packet had only three hulls left in the water ... two in- surance claims pending, and no capital to be ‘squandered’ on the ser- vices of a clerk. Jim was quite able to do the work, so Jim would do it, and no argument.
The wind grew more violent with the hour. The wreckers need hardly trouble themselves tonight, yet somewhere men would be out, showing false lights to lure a vessel inshore. Desperate and foolhardy skippers would be rushing for what cover they could get. How many times had a deceiver’s light lured prey onto the very rocks where the ‘salvage crew’ lay waiting?
The grandmother clock in the hall struck six as Jim threw down his pen. Daylight had dwindled, the sky was thickly overcast, dim with a deep, steel-blue twilight of boiling clouds and flying spray. Jim was working by the illumination of a lamp, though it should still have been daylight. Rain lashed the window glass, and he set aside the paperwork for moment to watch the splendor of the storm. Lightning sheeted out the sky and forked in the north, and his view offered him an entire panorama.
Marrick Hall perched on the cliff south of Scarborough, well out of the town. From the north windows one could see the great hunched shape of the castle, like a giant on the headland, looming over the south bay where the town huddled. Lightning forked, northeast to south-west, and for a split second he could see rooftops, pick out the line of the headland, the shape of the castle’s keep. It seemed a battle was be- ing fought on the horizon, and Scarborough was lit up, deafened, by unseen artillery.
The town’s buildings seemed to shrink together for comfort under the onslaught of Nature. Narrow streets led steeply down to the water-front, cottages seemed sometimes to physically cling to the cliffs, sitting one atop the other, and below it all Scarborough’s bay and harbor threshed and heaved.
A few fishing boats remained tied up, jostling dangerously at their moorings; several smacks and the coast guard cutter were even then trying to make it in to safety, and the ugly little steam tug Good Intent stood by them. Most of the fishing fleet was at sea, and Jim had re- ceived word not an hour ago, a large number of boats had run for Whitby while others headed south with the storm winds behind them, hoping to make it to shelter on the Humber.
An hour ago the lighthouse had begun to flash out its warning to shipping as daylight prematurely failed. If mist rolled in on the gale the foghorn would soon begin to bellow like an enraged bull and all Scar- borough would get no sleep.
Pushing aside the books, Jim went to the window, rested his flat palms against the cold glass and watched the lighthouse. He counted the rhythmic pulses, so familiar to anyone who had lived in this place even a year.
April had begun as the proverbial lamb, a mild month — far too clement for the fair weather to last. Good weather so early in the year, said the old folks, would turn into busy nights for the salvage crews. Jim sighed, eyes half closed against the flicker of lightning. Mick Hut-ton would be at the old boathouse, north of Castle Hill. It would be sweet black coffee, salt-beef sandwiches, oilskins, and the telescope with which he kept vigil as surely as the other salvage crews, and the wreckers.
No ship was safe in an east or northeast gale; some skippers had better sense than to put out into weather which could drive them up on a shore with no chance of shelter, but others surrendered to pressure from foolhardy passengers to whom money was a god.
And the Mascot? Jim cast a glance at his desk. A silver tea tray and several cups commanded a corner; a carelessly uncapped inkwell stood beside the open ledger, under it, a newspaper, and a cable dated the day before. 17th April, 1862: ‘Business done. Sailing in Mascot if weath- er holds. Ryan.’
The Mascot should have tied up in Scarborough at five, unless her skipper had decided to take refuge up on the Tees — or else not to put out of Edinburgh at all. Jim might have prayed Captain Rob Butterwick had stayed in port, but he knew Butterwick too well. The man was reck- less, he owned the hulls he captained and he would do anything to keep a promised schedule since most of his competitors were running steamers. And Robert E. Butterwick was well insured.
So the Mascot had surely sailed, and damn the weather. Ryan would certainly have cabled again if they had dallied in Edinburgh, and Jim had received no further message; he took this as his guarantee. Heaven help her, the Mascot was at sea.
So, in the name of any sailor’s god, where was she? Rain sluiced across the window glass and, the better to see, Jim opened it. The ozone tang of the sea was heavy, overpowering on the air; thunder pealed like cannon on the other side of the castle, and the ocean was the color of lead.
It was hard to believe, but this was a spring night, just a fortnight short of the old pagan festival of Beltane. Daylight was almost gone. Peering, Jim saw no sign of a ship in the offing, though the smacks and cutter had battled their way into harbor by now. Scarborough was bat- tened down, her people content to wait out the storm as they had done for centuries.
The old fishermen swore it would blow till morning — and they had predicted this weather for two days, with some fey alchemy Jim actually envied. He believed he possessed half a notion of how to read the tide, waves and water, but only a lifetime lived on, and even in, the ocean would teach a man how to read the sea like a book.
Bill Ryan was far more adept at this particular skill than Jim ever expected to be; but then, Ryan had spent half his life in ships — a dozen different vessels, first as a lowly midshipman, more lately with the commission of a lieutenant in command of a twenty-two gun Naval sloop, until the day of his fall from grace. Now Ryan was simply the skipper of a twelve-year-old gaff-rigged schooner, plying between Scotland and Ireland, the ports of France, Holland, Scandinavia and the rich markets on the Thames. And against the odds, he seemed content with the Adelaide.
What Jim knew of Ryan’s life was little, for Ryan seemed reluctant to offer more than one terse word about his Naval service. Long ago, Jim had learned when not to harass him with unwanted questions. Ryan’s face would become a blank mask, as surely as if he had put up storm shutters. His mouth would compress and intelligent conversa-tion was at an end for an hour at least, until he forgave the invasion of his privacy.
Yet Ryan seemed more than satisfied to skipper the Adelaide from Rotteredam or Skagerak to King’s Lynn and then home to Scarborough. She was well-maintained, a fast, agile little ship, as responsive to know- ing, careful hands as a lover. Under Ryan’s captaincy she had, in just two voyages, become Eastcoast Packet’s main earner; and for months now she had been the final bastion between Jonathan Hale and the bank.
The Adelaide was under repairs but the damage was minor — a brok- en block-and-tackle, fallen rigging, a weakened foremast. She would be on the water again in a week for the cost of a chandler’s account, but her survival was to Ryan’s credit. The damage could have been much worse.
Until the Spindrift launched in August, the Adelaide was the only ship Eastcoast possessed which could safely undertake the run to the Scandinavian timber and dairy ports. This knowledge brought Jim a small but uncomfortable pang of anxiety.
He stood back from the window as the wind whipped toward him, and slammed it shut as the gale burst into the room, sending papers fluttering to the floor. His reflection gazed back from the glass: a head of unruly brown hair, direct eyes with the power to arrest, and at this exact moment, a worried expression betraying the turmoil in the pit of his belly. He felt an unpleasant tingling, like a half-felt shiver, as if a chill wind blew on sweated bare skin, while in fact he stood in a closed room where a fire burned brightly, a pendulum clock ticked softly on the mantle and the lamp hissed like a snake over his desk.
The unease in his gut was premonition, and he knew it. He recog-nized the sensation, had felt it too many times before. After ten years’ vigil, watching the moods and humors of the sea, a man attained a kind of feyness which to some perhaps appeared like the second sight. Jim Hale knew better.
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